Sometimes I can "will" my way out of it. Seldom, actually, but I have had the experience and it can feel great. I'm trying to do that now.

I'm not finding a "toe-hold" though to push off from. It seems to take that. I just posted all about my blues. Now, if I stop the self-preoccupation and look at others with trouble, maybe that will stop me sitting here feeling sorry for myself.

I'm sorry, Continuously Blue, that you have chronic pain along with chronic depression. I would think that one feeds into the other and that must be truly hard.

Your analogy about overcoming depression through willpower being like "trying to operate" on yourself struck mean as very apt. I totally get that. We can tend to our cut fingers and, with the good hand, we can put a bandage on the injured hand. I've seen in movies where elite military personnel are able, thanks to training, to suture their own wounds. Maybe - stuck on a desert island with a bad laceration and some thread and a needle - you and I might even be capable of that. I wonder???

There has to be motivation, though. Getting that might be the problem. Maybe we feel we have nothing to look forward to. Or maybe where we are at doesn't feel so horrendously awful that we would do just about anything to get somewhere else. Like - I can't seem to get out my apartment door. But if the place went on fire, I'm sure I would manage to get out that door.

Sorry, if this is not very helpful. Mainly, I just want to say I understand that, at times, you probably just can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Wish they would invent a will pill.